Defining Berkhamsted Common

In which I try to explain the extent of Berkhamsted Common.

For something so substantial, Berkhamsted Common is very elusive; a slippery place, that is hard to pin down. It is hidden in the countryside north of Berkhamsted, a plateau landscape of woodlands, parks, golf courses, hedged fields, open grassy areas, and houses set in large wooded grounds. Classic Chilterns. It is hidden in plain sight, a distant wall of trees visible from the town centre. Much of this landscape goes under the general name of ‘Ashridge’, so much so that my young daughters thought that ‘Ashridge’ meant any wooded area.

Berkhamsted Common is a specific and unique entity in history, in law, and on the ground. But its bounds are leaky, and its neighbours intrude. How people think about it is affected by cultural ideas of what a common looks like; how its owners manage it; how they encounter it on the local road network; and how it is (not) signed or represented on maps. Sometimes I ask people where they think Berkhamsted Common is. The question pauses them, as if they had not really considered it before. No one gives exactly the same answer.

The Common is not defined by ownership; it had one owner until the 1920s, now most of it is owned by two organisations, with some small pieces owned by others. Nor is it defined by vegetation. Some parts of the common look like an archetypal common landscape of open space, heathland and rough grass with scrub. But its woodlands and golf course are also on common land. One characteristic is that it has no internal fences, by law. The roads that cross it, despite being busy with fast traffic, are unfenced. You can walk anywhere on it, unimpeded by artificial boundaries (the brambles and bracken and fallen wood are another matter).

From Google Earth pro 11 Sept 2025, with the yellow line added by me to show roughly where the Common’s boundary is. North is at the top.

I have traced the boundary on Google Earth. It gives me an area of 4.65 square kilometres and a perimeter of 17.5km. A not insubstantial parcel of land. (There are two private enclosures completely surrounded by the Common – they are small - a house and garden - so I have not marked them).

There is an immediately obvious problem with this Google Earth screen grab, which makes my point. There is no prominent ‘Berkhamsted Common ‘ label on it, but there is ‘Northchurch Common’, clearly marked.

Berkhamsted Common has a number of distinctive subsections. Starting in the east at Potten End, there is an area of open woodland and old gravel pits, with a busy unfenced road, which might be thought of as no more than some roadside waste, and part of the village’s patchwork of fragmented greens. Going north west, there is Berkhamsted Golf Club’s course. Continuing up the road towards Ashridge House, to the left there is an ancient woodland, called Frithsden Beeches. South of the Beeches, away from the road, is an area covered with woodland, scrub, and open heathland. The Golf Club (who own this) call it the ‘Western Slopes’. Much of it was used to dig practice trenches (for World War I) so it is often called ‘The Trenches’ by locals. To the north is a large sloping unfenced field of open grassland, which extends across most of the common to the Ashridge Road. There are many private names for this, but the Golf Club call it Cox’s Field. North west of this, through a birch wood edge, there is a remote area, away from roads, which connects the two more accessible ends. For the last eighty years the heathland here has been colonised by trees, creating an extensive birch and oak wood. Graham Greene called it ‘Coldharbour’. I call it Coldharbour Birches, to distinguish it from the adjoining farmstead. At the north west end, it is crossed by the B4506 road from Northchurch to Ringshall. There is a small impenetrable triangle of Common on the other side of the road. Turning south west, the neck of the Common is crossed by banks topped with collapsing ancient trees. There is more birch and oak woodland, before opening up into a very large scrubby field known as ‘Northchurch Common’, fringed by woodland, with an eye-catching group of spruce trees in the middle. As the Common drops off the edge of the plateau onto the slopes above Northchurch, the vegetation returns to more bracken covered ground, scrub and patches of young woodland, until it tails out on the road down into the valley, before the housing starts.

The definition of the historic Berkhamsted Common was argued over by some very senior lawyers in November 1869, and the judge, Lord Romilley, the Master of Rolls, ruled that Northchurch and Berkhamsted were one manor, and that there was one common that belonged to the manor. Hence there is only Berkhamsted Common.

The story of the event that precipitated the case, and the historical researches that went into its preparation is told by Lord Eversley in Commons, Forests and Footpaths (Cassell & Company, 1910). A map in the book shows the extent of the historical common:

From Lord Eversley, ‘Commons, Forests and Footpaths’ (Cassell & Company, 1910)

The status of Berkhamsted Common was given further legal definition when was registered as a common in the 1960s, following new legislation to recognise and protect commons. The registered land is recorded at Hertfordshire County Council, and is viewable on the Government’s ‘MAGIC’ website

https://magic.defra.gov.uk/ ( I can’t reproduce the maps here for copyright reasons). The registration is a bit untidy as it was done by the owners for their own land, and there were some omissions, so the Open Spaces Society has recently submitted corrections.

At the start of my project, before I knew it was a project, I tried to draw my own map of the Common, which made me realise how uncertain I was about it. I spent two days walking its perimeters, and found the boundary clear on the ground. Mostly it is marked by earth banks, of a great age suggested by the ancient trees growing on top of them. They are at least 400 years old. Where there are hard boundaries with farmland and gardens, the banks are topped by, or adjacent to, fences and hedges. In other places, in woodlands, where the National Trust owns the land on both sides, the boundary is still clearly defined by low banks. Only in a few short lengths is the boundary unclear, such as around the Golf Club car park. The banks were made in ancient times to make it beyond dispute where the Common was: this did not entirely succeed as centuries of argument and doubt have followed, as is characteristic of any apparently ‘empty’, ‘waste’ land.